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Roku rakes in $45m and Google goes gaga for Fiber…here’s the week’s Media news in review

There was a lot of big news in the digital media realm this week, with Q2 reports, acquisitions, investments and rumors galore. Here we present a selection of some of the key developments.

AOL, BSkyB, Virgin

In a week that saw AOL announce $531m revenue for Q2 2012 – its lowest revenue decline in 7 years, we might add – the former Internet lynchpin launched its music app PLAY for Kindle Fire, noting in its announcement that it had been entirely redesigned for the Amazon-made device.

PLAY is a music player that lets you listen to MP3 tracks on your device, while discovering new music via AOL’s weekly album selection, CD Listening Party. The app was already available on iOS and Android and, according to AOL, it has been downloaded around 1 million times since it launched last year.

Finally, you can always rely on Google to make the headlines, whether it’s for Search, Maps, or TV…as it did this week. The Internet giant announced that it’s getting into the Internet Service Provider (ISP) game. Its new offering, Google Fiber, was announced in Kansas City where the service is only available for now, but from what we can tell, it’s ridiculously fast.

For $70 a month you’ll get “gigabit” Internet service, which is 100 times faster than your standard cable modem. Throw in an extra $50 a month and you’ll get cable-TV-like-service too. Google is calling this service “the next chapter of the Internet”.

But digital trumping print aside, one of the other big shifts we’re seeing in the media sphere is the tight integration with social channels, something that was most evident this week.

Not long after NBC’s partnership with the mighty Facebook to promote Olympic-related chat on its own Facebook Page, TechCrunchreported on NBC’s link-up with Storify to include real-time streams of Olympic content across Today.com “as well as NBC’s 10 owned TV station websites.” That said, NBC was rightly criticized for its poor coverage of the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games.

“Under the updated guidelines AP journalists are told their ‘first obligation’ in the case of a big breaking news event, ‘is to provide full details to the appropriate newsdesk for use in AP services if the desk isn’t tuned in already'”, wrote Journalism.co.uk. “But once they have informed the newsdesk and taken care of ‘any other immediate AP work’ they are now ‘free to tweet or post information about the news development’ on Twitter.”